Posts by Laurie Fendrich
May 16, 2012, 10:57 AM ET
Paint It High and Deep
Most working artists in America (certainly most who teach at
colleges and universities) hold a Master of Fine Arts degree,
established by the College Art Association, more than 50 years ago,
as the terminal degree in the fine arts. As Dan
Berrett writes in this week’s Chronicle,
however, that may be about to change. The College Art Association
is now tiptoeing around the idea of embracing the studio Ph.D. as
the new terminal degree in the fine arts. Recently, the CAA hosted
a workshop entitled, “Ph.D. for Artists: Sense or Nonsense?” The
title tells you everything you need to know about how differently
people in the art world view the idea. On one side are those for
whom a Ph.D. in studio art can’t come too soon. It would address
the needs of internationally active, postmodern artists who are
prominent in the contemporary art world and strive to stay
competitive with their...
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April 9, 2012, 07:28 PM ET
The Other 1 Percent
On Saturday, a friend who lives in upstate New York invited me to
come along with her to an annual “county pageant” at a local resort
hotel. As soon as I arrived, I saw that even though the word
“beauty” wasn’t anywhere in sight—neither on the banner, nor on any
of the brochures—the county pageant quacked a lot like the duck
commonly called a “beauty pageant.” The pageant I attended was in
an enormous, dimly lit, multitiered auditorium whose walls were
covered with red velvet. Here and there, on a few lonely sconces, I
caught the sparkle of fake gold. Overhead spotlights lighted a
wide, shallow proscenium. Some sort of unidentifiable (at least to
me) teen music filled the room. (Later it would almost drown out
the voice of the female MC.) Once seated, I surveyed the
audience—300 or so people who looked to me like solid members of
the American middle class. They...
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March 19, 2012, 09:11 AM ET
Here's Looking at Me, Kid
That women are more vain than men seems obvious, at first glance.
Take the vast amount of retail space and the enormous sums of money
devoted to the shopping and primping needs of women, compared to
those of men. Think about all the women who, daily, paint their
faces before they go out in public. Or consider how many women
happily drop a couple of hundred bucks on a new hair color, or
willingly hobble around in a painful pair of super-high,
spiked-heeled shoes, just for the sake of appearance. (Only women
categorize part of their footwear inventory as “walking shoes.” )
Vanity, of course, is self-love. The philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau identified two kinds of self-love—one a healthy sort of
self-interestedness, which he thought living in society destroyed,
the other the vanity that comes about from living in society—a
self-consciousness that renders us constantly aware of...
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February 15, 2012, 08:44 AM ET
Harvard Grad Succeeds!
You’re right, I don’t know much about basketball. Even so, I’m
caught up in “Linsanity”—infatuation with the story of Jeremy Lin,
the super-great Knicks point guard who’s the first Chinese American
to make it big in the NBA. He’s helped (understatement) the Knicks
by winning the last six games in a row, making for the longest
running streak in their season. It’d be hard for me not to
be part of Linsanity. First, this is happening in New York, the
city where people come to make it, but most often fail. If you make
it here, it’s a world story. Second, I’m married to
basketball-watching freaks. My husband, who way back in the day
played guard in high school, loves the game so much he’ll watch
reruns of games from two decades ago. Plus I’ve got a daughter
who’s a passionate Knicks fan. Lin is all the two of them talk
about lately. Although the MSG/Time Warner...
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January 23, 2012, 03:38 PM ET
The Fall of Photography
Last week, the International Center for Photography in New York
opened
an exhibition of works by the great street and crime
photographer Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), professionally known as
Weegee because of his Ouija-board prescience about arriving at
crime scenes so quickly. Also last week, Eastman Kodak—the company
that made the kind of film Weegee and other major modern
photographers relied on—declared
bankruptcy. The end of traditional film photography was augured
in the early 1990s, when digital cameras first started being sold,
but Kodak’s demise signals yet another step in the march to its
doom. It demonstrates that for all the darkroom holdouts, most
people today use digital cameras for their photographs. Face it,
darkroom fans, times have changed. Almost all images—including
paintings—sooner or later land in someone’s computer. The whole
world is pixelating, and...
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January 10, 2012, 10:48 AM ET
The Résumé Reader
There’s an identifiable human type out there—I don’t know what
others call it, or how its particularities manifest themselves in
academe or the rest of the world, but in the art world, I call it
the “Résumé Reader.” Say I’m at an art opening for a friend’s
exhibition and I see someone I know. I smile, walk over to the
person, and offer the usual, “Hey, nice to see you. How are you?"
With a non-Résumé Reader, what follows is the ordinary
stuff—something like this: “Hi, great to see you, too! I’m doing
OK. My classes are going really well—I have a couple of really
interesting students. Plus I’m lucky because I’ve got a course off,
so I’m getting more studio time this semester. I’ve stretched up
some big canvases to work on. I’ve been feeling pretty
good—swimming again regularly. Anyway, how are you?”
Thereupon follows a chat—some pleasant...
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December 12, 2011, 01:45 PM ET
Dear Jane, What Did you Look Like? Love, Laurie
Reading Jane Austen’s four greatest novels (P&P, S&S,
Emma, and Persuasion) at least 20 times each over the course
of my life, dipping almost daily into their delights, and
memorizing whole passages of these novels by heart, fail to qualify
me as a Janeite. For that honor, I would need to have memorized
much more than such obviously revered passages as the opening line
to Pride and Prejudice or Darcy’s chastened second
proposal to Elizabeth Bennett. I’d need to know about Austen’s
snarky remarks about neighbors with fat necks and bad breath, and
how she preferred her brother Henry to her other brothers (once
exclaiming, “Oh! What a Henry!”) I’d also have had to prove
myself worthy of being asked to join the Janeite club by trekking
to every location where Jane Austen once sucked in a molecule of
air or her characters took a morning walk. Even so, I was atingle
at the news...
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November 22, 2011, 12:24 PM ET
Put Poor Students to Work
In his speech on Friday at the Harvard Kennedy School of
Government, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
offered an imaginative plan to lift poor students out of the
cycle of poverty: Have them clean their own schools for money. Not
only would the students earn income, they’d build a strong work
ethic. The only thing holding us back from following through with
this truly terrific idea are child labor laws, which Mr. Gingrich
called “truly stupid.” Mr. Gingrich’s plan, although morally and
economically sound, unfortunately doesn’t go far enough. To instill
a true work ethic in poor students, they need to double up on
cleaning schools. I propose that after cleaning their own schools,
squads of them be sent out to clean rich kids’ schools—especially
prep schools. Not only would they earn even more money, they’d be
inspired by having to mop the bathrooms where rich kids...
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November 14, 2011, 01:54 PM ET
Drawing’s Got Talent
For every college class of 20 or so beginning-drawing students, one
or two show up with extraordinary drawing talent. I’m talking about
students with a ready ability to see and draw shape, to see and
draw in proportion, to draw to scale, to draw the symmetry of
things, to sense visual balance, to place objects on a picture
plane in an interesting way, and to use a sensitive touch in their
mark and line. Talented drawing students not only find it fairly
easy to make drawings where a doggie looks like a doggie, they also
draw the doggie in a beautiful way that transcends mere mechanical
imitation. Those of us who teach drawing know how to spot the
super-talented drawing students on the first day of class—generally
within the first 20 minutes. They always draw boldly from the
get-go, using both their shoulder and arm, rather than merely the
hand. Many of them show off at least a...
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October 31, 2011, 01:25 PM ET
Tax the Poor
In an
article in the liberal online rag
The Huffington Post, Michael McAuliffe points out that
several Republican leaders and leading conservatives are asking for
the poor to pay more in taxes. McAuliffe quotes Senator John Coryn
of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee,
in a speech given in the Senate this past July: "A majority of
American households paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada. No
income tax was paid by 51 percent of the households in America in
2009.” Coryn added, “[T]o show how out of whack things have gotten,
30 percent of American households actually made money from the tax
system by way of refundable tax credits -- the earned income tax
credit, among others.” Republican Senator Orrin Hatch chimed in
during the same Senate debate with this: “The poor need jobs! And
they also need to share some of the responsibility.” McAuliffe...
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